Use Watson services deployed to an iPhone with ARKit to have a voice-powered animated avatar in Unity

Summary

This code pattern shows how to use Watson Assistant, Watson Speech to Text, and Watson Text to Speech services deployed to an iPhone with ARKit to have a voice-powered animated avatar in Unity. Augmented reality allows a lower barrier to entry for both developers and users thanks to framework compatibility in phones and digital eyewear.

Description

Unity3d is a great gaming engine that has morphed into a platform for immersive experiences outside of just gaming. Unity developers are looking to expand their skills and use things like artificial intelligence in their projects. A great entry point is building a voice-enabled chatbot experience.

Chatbots and virtual agents bring a more human-like conversational experience to something previously highly scripted. While this pattern shows the animated character walking only forward and backward, it would take only a small amount of work to voice control walking, for example, left or right. Instead of the user having a small number of sayings or phrases, the chatbot can be configured to handle a large number of phrases that mean the same thing and even learn over time.

This pattern brings three Watson services together to give you a chance to work with AI without having to build or train models directly. Watson Assistant, Watson Speech to Text, and Watson Text to Speech services work together to offer an immersive experience without the complex natural language processing burden on the developer.

Flow

Run the app on an iPhone and speak a command like “Walk forward.”

The character is rendered in a nearby horizontal plane.

The Watson Speech to Text service is triggered, which converts the audio to text.

The text is received and sent to Watson Assistant.

Watson Assistant prepares a response and sends the response to Watson Text to Speech.

The character responds verbally and the animation to walk forward is triggered.

Instructions

Find the detailed steps for this pattern in the readme file. The steps will show you how to:

Download the code from GitHub.

Download and install the Watson SDK for Unity from the Unity Asset store.

Create service instances for Watson Assistant, Watson Speech to Text, and Watson Text to Speech, and add the credentials to the Unity editor.

Upload the .json file to Watson Assistant, and add the workspace information to the Unity editor.